To use clusters for production planningThe supply source of the clustered item is production, if you set the Supply Source field in the Items - Planning (cprpd1100m000) session to Production/Purchase. This occurs if the current moment falls in a period for which you defined a date effectivity line in the Date-Effective Supply Source (tcibd0510m000) session, with the Item Type field set to Production. For plan items that are supplied by means of production, you must define a product structure in the Bill of Material (tibom1110m000) session, the tasks, the machines, and the work shop to produce the item in the corresponding session in the Routing module of Manufacturing, as well as the critical components and capacity required to produce the item. Because Manufacturing does not support clustered items, the materials and the operations in the order horizon are exploded by means of the bill of material (BOM) and the routing of the general item, as are the critical components and the critical capacities in the planning horizon. When the default supply source of a clustered item is production, Enterprise Planning creates planned production orders for the clustered item and the clustered warehouse. However, because the clustered plan item does not have its own BOM and routing, Enterprise Planning explodes dependent demand and operations via the BOM and the routing of the general item. For master-based planning, Enterprise Planning uses the general bill of critical materials and the bill of critical capacities to explode dependent demand to critical materials and critical capacities. Clustered components in the BOM In a bill of material, a component can be clustered, and the warehouse on the BOM line can be the clustered warehouse that is linked to the component in the Items - Planning (cprpd1100m000) session. This feature supports business cases in which a non-clustered/central warehouse replenishes a WIP warehouse on the shop floor, and at the same time the inventory of the component involved must be reserved for production of a main item, when the component is also sold directly to customers. To model this situation, you must define a supplying relationship between the central warehouse and the WIP warehouse to let Enterprise Planning automatically create planned production orders to replenish the WIP warehouse during a planning run. Because you cannot specify a WIP warehouse in the warehouse field of the Sales Orders session, the inventory kept in the WIP warehouse is protected from being directly sold to customers. You can only enter the non-clustered, central warehouse in sales orders for the component. If you defined multiple (quantity dependent) routings in the Item - Routings (tirou1101m000) session, with various work centers, instead of putting a WIP warehouse on the BOM line, you can link the warehouse to a work center in the Work Centers (tirou0101m000) session. During planning, Enterprise Planning puts the dependent demand for components on the default warehouse of the plan item. When Enterprise Planning transfers the orders to the Job Shop Control module, the component allocation is automatically shifted to the right WIP warehouse. Example: distribution structure with
clusters In the following example, R is a resource, A through E are warehouses. The arrows represent supplying relationships. ![[...]](../images/nt_graph_000339.gif)
Item BIKE is manufactured at resource R, and stocked at warehouse A. From there, BIKE is first distributed to warehouses B and C (which, from a planning point of view, can be considered as one unit), and then to warehouses D and E (considered as one planning unit) and warehouse F. In Enterprise Planning, the item BIKE is represented by the following plan items:
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